by Mike Sager
The Pope rested his hand on Waylon’s shoulder. “Don’t fault yourself for things you cannot control, my son. You’ve always done your best. Come meet my new friend.” He indicated Kwan. “He’s familiar with our work. He wants to become a member of the church.”
“He sells rock up on Fourteenth and Q,” Beta Max said. Without his video camera to hide his face, which was sharp-featured and boyish, he looked very much like the person he was—a preacher’s son from Enid, Oklahoma, who dressed like a member of a satanic cult. (In truth he was an existentialist and an atheist.)
Kwan maintained his pose on the bench, his face frozen in an expression of menace and hauteur. He had no idea what to make of the Pope and his crew. In his entire lifetime, he’d been inside only one white person’s house—Seede’s. He knew nothing of white people except what he’d seen on movies and TV. He sucked his teeth, brushed an imaginary piece of lint off his shoulder. These mothafuckas crazy.
“How long until we can get out of here, counselor?” the Pope asked Waylon.
The lawyer did a mental double take. The Pope asking a straightforward question: not a good sign. “From here, they’ll take us to be processed—mug shots and fingerprints,” he explained dispassionately, finding comfort in lawyer mode. “Then they’ll move us upstairs. We’ll be arraigned tomorrow morning. I can represent us, pro se, no problem.”
“That’s great, toots.”
“Well, yes, it is great,” Waylon said, measuring his enthusiasm. “But getting out, that’s a little bit trickier, I’m afraid. It will depend upon what they set as bond and whether we can raise the cash. And it will also depend upon—and this is a big one—whether or not the DA is gonna flag you as a three-strikes case. If they do, I’m afraid we’re going to be looking at an extended stay in custody.”
“We’re all gonna be stuck in here?”
Long pause, long face. “Probably just you, your holiness.”
The Pope of Pot said nothing. The life went out of his eyes.
Waylon took the Pope’s hands in his own. “Right now, what I think we need to do first is get you into the hospital wing. They have really good facilities up on the eighth floor. You’ll have a soft bed, your own telephone and TV, round-the-clock nursing—”
As Waylon spoke, Louie the albino, sans rabbit fur hat, moved about the room in a crablike fashion, opening the wadded brown paper bags, looking for one that still contained a jail-issue baloney sandwich. In the vicinity of Kwan’s bench, he picked up a bag, unwadded it, peered inside. “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Check it out!”
Like a boy with a box of Cracker Jacks, he held aloft his prize.
Six inches in overall length, it appeared to be some sort of found-art assemblage of broken office supplies—the top and bottom halves of a ballpoint pen, two pencils broken into four pieces, several rubber bands.
“Zip gun,” pronounced Waylon.
Kwan swooped down from his perch and snatched the object from Louie’s hand.
Waylon took a step forward. “I’ll take that,” he said with authority.
Kwan resumed his squatting position on the bench. He held the gun high and sideways, like a character in a movie. He played it across the cell.
With some effort, the Pope rose to his feet and moved unsteadily toward Kwan, listing a bit to one side as he went, owing to the slope of the floor. On his face was an expression of utter disappointment. “You planning on busting out of here with that, Mr. Capone?”
“Give it up,” advised Waylon.
The Pope opened his arms beseechingly. “We’re all fighting the same battle against injustice, my son. We can’t be enemies. We must be allies. We’re like homeys, capisce? We have to work together. The man is out to get us. He’s railroaded me and my people. We don’t belong in this jail. And neither, I’m sure, do you. You seem like a fine young person—and handsome too, with the most lovely eyes. Stick with us. Waylon here is a lawyer. He will lead us out of harm’s way. God the all-powerful does what he wants, when and where he wants, in the style he would have it. And that’s a good beginning, toots. Now hand me that thing, will you please?”
At that very instant, four floors above, in the state-of-theart command center of the DCCJ, a guard with the improbable name of O. K. Jones glanced up at the bank of video screens that occupied the entire wall to his left. On one of the screens, marked “Tank 22,” he observed a young black male who appeared to be wielding a handgun.
Jones hit the panic button on the top of the console.
An alarm sounded, a piercing double wail, evocative of the car chase scenes in old James Bond movies: wee-ahh, wee-ahh!
Within minutes the jail’s elite tactical response team was surging down the first floor hallway, two by two in lockstep, a tidal wave of adrenalized manflesh, all of them wearing identical black jumpsuits and black motorcycle helmets with mirrored visors, their black Gore-Tex boots slapping urgently against the concrete floor. The lead element carried riot shields, built especially for use in prison settings. Fabricated from bulletproof Lexan, the front of the shield was crosshatched with silver tape. With the press of a button, a deputy could send fifty thousand volts coursing through the body of an unruly inmate. Bringing up the rear of the eight-man contingent were two officers carrying weapons that looked, on first inspection, like some kind of cartoon version of thirties-era tommy guns. The ammo, worn across their chests in crossed bandoliers, was called “rubber projectile batons.” There were two varieties. The lower energy round could pierce a mattress.
Reaching Tank 22, the squad commander barked something into his headset. The school bell sounded again, blending with the deafening wee-ahh. The blue metal door slid open.
The Pope of Pot raised his hands weakly. “Howdy, honey, howdy.”
The tactical response team rushed inside.
21
Bo Franklin parted his meaty lips to accept the stem of his water pipe. He raised his butane lighter—a metallic click, the whoosh of pressurized gas, an ice blue cone of fire …
Abruptly he doused the flame and looked up thoughtfully at Seede, who was sitting in the chair opposite. “It wasn’t till about the third time I smoked that I really got off,” he said, gesturing with the pipe. “I mean, all the way off.”
“All the Way Off,” Seede repeated, a tone of recognition. “The title of your second album.”
Franklin looked pleased. It had been more than a decade since he was last on stage in his trademark jumpsuit and shoulder-length African hair extensions—women used to throw their panties. He hadn’t been seen in public since his parole from Folsom State Prison. Few were aware he’d had his hip replaced or that he’d returned to his home town to recuperate. During his recovery, he’d had a minor stroke.
“When are we talking about here?” Seede asked. “What was the time period?”
“It was right after Frankenfunk hit number one. So it had to be what—1983? No. Eighty-two. January of eighty-two, I think it was. After New Year’s. Or maybe it was right after Valentine’s Day.”
“They say that if you can remember the eighties, you weren’t really there.”
“One thing I do remember clearly: a messenger came from the record company. He handed me an envelope. Inside was a check for $1.8 million.”
“That’s not the kind of thing you forget.”
“It was funny, cause at the time, I had no money. I had this huge check, but I had to borrow two bucks from one of the guys to go buy cigarettes.”
“So we’re talking about freebase, right? This was before commercial crack hit the streets—that didn’t get going until about 1986. Did you cook it up yourself?”
“I hired this dude to cook for me, an older brother. We called him Chef Boyardee. Back in the day, he worked for this big coke dealer. He’d go with him to all the buys to test the shit. He’d weigh out a couple grams of the product and cook it up—baking soda and water, applied to heat. Is that what you used? I don’t suppose you used no ether. That shit hard to come by an
ymore.”
“Baking soda and water,” Seede confirmed. “I think you get a better yield with Evian instead of tap. I use a glass jar and a pot of boiling water.”
Franklin raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Chef Boyardee would cook the shit for the dealer, then he’d weigh the comeback. That was your percentage purity. You cook three grams and get back two—that’s 66 percent pure. Which, by the way, would be a rip-off. Back in the day it was probably 80 percent, close to 90—people wasn’t so greedy then. After they weighed the shit, they’d throw it away. You couldn’t snort it. It was too coarse. Sometimes I think about it—all the damn freebase people done throwed in the trash.”
“I wonder who first figured out you could smoke it?”
“Some sprung motherfucker, fo sho. Someone who needed another hit.”
“Human ingenuity.”
“Know what I’m sayin?”
“Actually,” Seede said, “it isn’t only humans who like to get high. You know how coke was discovered? People in the Andes mountains noticed their llamas were eating it all the time—man just followed their lead. Elephants have been observed eating fermented fruit until they fall over. Same with birds and other species—flying into trees, stumbling off cliffs, you name it. There’s this scientist at UCLA who wrote a book about it. He says that getting high is a natural animal urge.”
“I can’t argue with dat.”
“So what about Chef Boyardee?”
“I hired him away from Sly Stone—doubled his salary. Put him on the payroll with full benefits. He was worth it too. He showed me the right way to smoke.”
“What do you mean, the right way?”
“Anything worth doin … you know what I’m sayin?”
“What were you doing wrong?”
“I was hittin it too hard, sucking it all through the screen; a lot of my hit was ending up as residue. And then after I took the hit, I was doin what you call fuckin off the high. Meaning that I wasn’t letting it settle into my brain right, wasn’t taking full advantage.”
“Not getting a good rush?”
“Not getting the full ride, let’s say.”
“Can you describe that first real time you were talking about? What did All the Way Off mean to you?”
Franklin replaced the lighter and the pipe on the arm of his chair. He let his hand fall into his lap, squeezed himself absently. “It was like … Motherfuck! Know what I’m sayin?”
“I think I do, yeah. Can you give me a little more detail?”
Franklin picked up the lighter, clicked it on and off a few times. “I don’t know. It’s like an orgasm. A whole body orgasm. You feel it all over, not just down low, in your privates.”
“Go on.”
He clicked the lighter on and off, on and off, looking for the right words. “It’s like … a bolt of lightning. It hits you in the top of your head and then drills a tunnel clear down to your groin, like drilling for oil, you know what I’m sayin? And then it strikes, and all the oil comes gushing up through your body and out your ears.” He made a whooshing noise, like the sound of a jet passing overhead. “Or, I don’t know … maybe it’s like everything is rushing in. Like if there’s music playing, your ears open up and all the music is amplified and sucked inside. It’s hard to describe. It’s intense. Your whole body just lights up. It makes this, like, sign of the cross inside of you”—he crossed the air before him, like a priest at mass—“this big, hot, electric cross.”
“Crucified on the electric cross,” Seede recited, another piece of lyric.
Franklin nodded.
“Can you give me more specifics about the exact feeling of the high?”
“More specifics? I don’t know. It’s just a whole other dimension. It’s hard to describe. You can talk shit to death, you know what I’m sayin? It’s not like I was no drug virgin, neither. I grew up in this neighborhood around all kinda drugs; we dibbled and dabbled our whole lives. I first smoked weed when I was nine. I had a motherfuckin heroin habit when I was sixteen. Went to my aunt’s house in North Carolina and kicked the shit cold turkey, came back home for summer football practice, motherfuckin two-a-days. I’ve done mescaline and peyote. I’ve taken soma pills. I’ve done amyl nitrate and acid and you name it, man. I’ve done every kind of drug that comes in a plant, and I’ve smoked or chewed every kind of herb from Africa you could think of. I’ve smoked every kind of hashish—Afghan, Moroccan, Nepalese. I’ve done all kinds of opiates: heroin, morphine, opium, Dilaudid. I’ve done it all. Methedrine and Benzedrine … I don’t think there’s anything—drug, booze, beer, Wild Irish Rose, Robitusson, Romilar, quaaludes, Valium, Halcion—that I haven’t tried. But this shit … This shit was different. I was like, Motherfuck! I got to share this shit with the entire planet.”
“Planet Rock.” Seede said. “I always thought it was talking about rock and roll. That’s what all the critics said.”
“People can think what they want. There’s nothing you can do about it no way.”
Seede looked down and checked his tape recorder. The little sprockets turned. “So what was the wildest thing you ever did while smoking coke?”
A wet laugh, followed by a phlegmy cough. “You know what? That’s just the kind of question you expect from a reporter.” He said the word with obvious distaste. “What’s the wildest … What’s the best … What’s your favorite … When someone asks me a question like that, you know the first thing that happens? My mind goes totally blank. Because that shit ain’t the point, know what I’m sayin? Lemme tell you somethin, Appleseed, from the perspective of the interviewee. If you don’t ask the right kind of questions, you just get the same old answers. You never gonna learn nothin. With rock cocaine—crack, freebase, what have you—you do a blast, you get the rush, and then the first thing that comes to your mind is doing something sexual, you know what I’m sayin? Something deviated from the norm. Something freaky. And it’s gotta be right away. This second. Without delay. It’s like that old commercial.” He sang the melody, a black snake moan: “It’s gotta be sweet and it’s gotta be a lot and you gotta have it now. All the shit you ever fantasized about. Shit you didn’t even know you was fantasizin about. It all comes into your mind. You don’t wanna think about nothin else. You cain’t think about nothin else. It deliver you straight to the devil’s door.”
Seede reached into his coat, which was lying across the ottoman, and extracted a notebook. “Funny you should say that. There’s this quote I found in the Library of Congress.” He turned the pages. “About what it feels like to smoke coke.”
“And?”
“It’s attributed to Lucifer.”
“You mean, like, the Lucifer?”
“I couldn’t find reference to any other Lucifer. It’s from a translation of a scholarly article written by a Peruvian academic. Instead of freebase or crack, he calls it ‘pasta.’ After a hit of pasta, he quotes Lucifer as writing, ‘a sweet taste of sex impregnates the immediate atmosphere—but not a normal sex … rather, a prohibited sex, sinful as the thousand promises of the exotic Babylonian prostitute.’”
“Lucifer on crack,” Franklin said skeptically.
“Suckin the devil’s dick: isn’t that what some people call smoking crack? Maybe the derivation—you know, maybe there’s a connection.”
“I’ve always heard it called the glass dick. Suckin on the glass dick.”
“Same difference, I suppose.”
“I suppose …”
Seede searched his mind for his next question. He kept coming back to the same one. “Now I’m really curious,” he said. “What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done on coke?”
Relenting: “I like smoking with a woman and having a tube and blowing the smoke up her pussy. Is that the kinda stuff you’re looking for?”
Seede looked at him, dumbfounded.
“Okay, check it out,” Franklin said, amused, adjusting himself in his chair. “You get a length of tube. You can get it anywhere. You can get the hose from the back
of a toilet, or you can use the straws from McDonald’s, or you can use the kind of clear plastic tubing they sell for aquariums—those are the best. You can get real long ones, or you can use shorter ones. I like a shorter one, so that you can be teasing the clit at the same time.”
“Okay. What happens next?”
“You blow the smoke up inside.”
“Mucus membranes,” Seede said.
“That’s right.”
“And then what?”
The wet laugh: “Planet O, baby.”
“Like the song.”
Franklin picked up the pipe and the lighter and heated the bowl. “See, if you hit it right, you don’t need no huge piece of rock.” His tone was warm; obviously he was enjoying the attention. Something else Seede had learned along the way: the more you let people talk, the more attentively you listen, the more they will like you, the more they will tell. Franklin raised the stem to his lips and took a long, slow drag. The water in the pipe bubbled; the sound reminded Seede of a fish tank. The rock threw off tiny sparks, made a crackling sound as it burned—the origin of its street name.
Eyes closed, Franklin held the hit in his lungs for a longish period and then exhaled—a sustained, modulated, voluminous stream of clean white smoke. Followed by a deep inhalation of fresh air, another exhalation …
And then his eyes popped open.
He spoke with great gusto: “Sometimes I’d be with a bitch and she couldn’t handle the shit. I’d give her the tube and she’d come so hard she’d fuckin stop breathing. I shit you not, her fuckin heart would stop. This happened like, four, five times. The girl would have this huge orgasm, and then she’d start convulsing. And then her eyes would roll back in her head, and she’d fuckin stop breathing. I had to use CPR. I had to get on her chest with the CPR and shit, I’d be doing motherfuckin mouth to mouth. I didn’t even know how to do it but I was doing it, you know what I’m sayin? Pumping on they chests, putting ice on em, puttin ice up their pussy, bringing em back to life. Literally. Bringing these bitches back to motherfuckin life. And that shit happened to me like four, five, six times.” He squeezed himself, as if he was testing the ripeness of a fruit. “Six times I killed a bitch with an orgasm.”